Regular, high-quality sleep is essential to our well-being. So let’s look at how sleep actually works. There are two levels of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and deep sleep, or slow-wave sleep. Every night, you go through several cycles of both levels. First, you dip into REM sleep, when you’re a bit restless and your eyes are literally darting back and forth inside your eyelids (which is where the name comes from). This is light sleep, but it’s crucial to your good health. Scientists don’t actually know why REM is so important, but they’ve done studies where rats were deprived of REM sleep and it killed them in just a few weeks. Once you cycle out of REM, you go into a deeper level of slow-wave sleep. That’s when the body does the repair work that needs to happen to keep you healthy. When you’re getting a good night’s sleep, you go through six or seven cycles of both REM and deep sleep.
Now, what happens when alcohol is introduced to the equation? Alcohol is a chemical depressant, so it reduces neural activity in the brain. Normally, your brain releases a variety of chemicals and hormones at different times to help bring you back to homeostasis. As you already know, homeostasis is the delicate balance where all the systems in your body are working correctly. When you drink, you’re introducing a foreign chemical. And in order to reach homeostasis, your brain has to release powerful counter-chemicals and stress hormones.
So the cycle looks like this:
You have a drink, and you stimulate your pleasure center while the blood alcohol is rising. But as time goes on and the alcohol levels start to go down, your brain knows there’s a depressant in your system. So it releases stimulants (adrenaline and cortisol) to bring you back up into homeostasis. Unfortunately, the depressant alcohol wears off before the stimulants do, and you’re left with an overstimulated brain for hours after the drinks have worn off. It’s as if you drank alcohol and a triple espresso at the same time. The alcohol wears off, but the espresso is still affecting you hours later.
The alcohol is disrupting your sleep schedule. After you drink, you go into a deep sleep for the first five hours or so. That might seem great, but you don’t get into REM sleep. And you need both. So while your body is trying to process all the chemicals in your body, your cycles are completely thrown out of whack. You wind up with only one or two cycles of REM sleep instead of the six or seven you actually need.
After those first five hours, you wake up and can’t get back to sleep. Many people wake up at three or four in the morning and fret about everything they can think of. The worry and regret creep in, and the negative thoughts take over the brain. All this is happening because you’re overstimulated and your body chemistry is completely out of balance. Here’s the thing—any amount of alcohol will disrupt your sleep. It doesn’t matter if you have one drink or you go on a margarita binge-fest. You’re not going to sleep well. If you do this night after night, the lack of quality sleep cycles will begin to take its toll.
And there’s another big problem. When you start getting ready for bed without alcohol in your system, your body releases its own chemicals to quiet you down and prepare you for sleep. But when you drink regularly, you train your brain to utilize the artificial depressants in the alcohol to do that job. So that means you’re relying on alcohol to put you to sleep. But you still aren’t rested, because your natural sleep rhythms are out of whack.
So what does this mean for you during this experiment? It means that for the first two to five nights of not drinking, your body may still be expecting those artificial depressants. Your brain might be confused during those early days, and you could have trouble falling asleep. The worst thing you can do at that point is to have a drink to help you sleep. It might seem like the right thing to do, but it will actually set your progress back. The good news is most people find they’re sleeping better than ever after the fifth night. You’ve given your brain time to readjust itself and get the chemical release balanced again. And once this happens, for the first time in years, or maybe decades, you will start getting the rest that your body so desperately needs. This is great news!
While you’re waiting for your brain to readjust, you can try a few tricks to help you get to sleep. First, avoid caffeinated drinks after about noon. Caffeine can affect the body for up to 10 hours. So you want it all out of your system by the time you’re ready to hit the sack. The other trick is to get a bit of exercise. When you get your body moving, you’ll actually find you sleep much better than if you’re at rest all day long. You don’t have to do anything extreme. You can simply take a walk in the fresh air and get your blood moving.
If you’ve been drinking for a long time, you may not even notice the daily fatigue you’re experiencing because of disrupted sleep patterns. You might think it’s because you’re “getting older.” Maybe you’re always tired and you tell yourself, “That’s just how I am.” We are so overworked and undernourished that fatigue has become completely normal. Let me give you some good news: Once you stop drinking and get your sleep regulated, that fatigue and brain fog often disappear completely. You’ll feel better than you have in ages! That’s your reward. But you have to get through those first few days and give your body a chance to fix itself.
The opposite of “I need alcohol to sleep” is “I don’t need alcohol to sleep.” Come up with as many ways as you can that the opposite is as true as or truer than the original belief.
If the only thing that people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.
—SYDNEY BANKS
When you decide to give up alcohol, you might experience some discomfort. I am not talking about severe physical addiction here. If you’ve been drinking heavily for a long time, your body and mind may have become physically dependent to the point where you have severe withdrawal symptoms, such as delirium tremens or hallucinations. If that’s the case, you need to get medical help. You may even need to be hospitalized for a while. When I say “discomfort,” I’m talking about the physical symptoms that occur while your body is healing itself. I’m also talking about the psychological and emotional discomfort that comes up because you’re giving up something you believe you need.
It takes time, up to a week or longer, for your body to rebalance after you stop drinking. While that’s happening, you’re probably going to feel uncomfortable. Because alcohol is physically addictive, there are withdrawal symptoms, which are different for different people. When I stopped drinking, I had headaches, anxiety, irritability, and weird nightmares that I accidentally had a drink. The first 10 days were the most intense, but the symptoms went on for about 30 days. Clearly, that’s longer than the time it took for the chemical substance to clear out of my body. So, what gives? Why did it take so long? Shouldn’t we feel better as soon as the alcohol is gone? Our bodies are more complicated than that, and there’s an emotional side to withdrawal as well.
When researchers studied heroin addicts, they found that the severity of withdrawal could depend on the individual’s access to the substance they were addicted to. For instance, if the person went to jail and suddenly had zero access to their drug of choice, the withdrawal symptoms weren’t as severe as one might expect. But when that person was released years later, and they suddenly had access again, the withdrawal symptoms came back. How weird is that? How is it possible to go through withdrawal years after ingesting a substance? This demonstrates how physical and emotional withdrawals are intertwined. Each affects the other, and our subconscious can easily keep things buried